prolific stems.
While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull.

And:

The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the
meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh
shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring
up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and
the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent,
with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song.

He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when

Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller
almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool
drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he
hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in
the soft kisses of the grass.

His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the
Garonne and Gers (Egircius):

So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the
grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which
the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the
rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly
becomes a sea.

He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great
satisfaction.

More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling
Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal
scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his journey
by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he shews a
keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as
for the minutiae of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also blends
his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making
it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her
own sake.

He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not
only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman
world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle
Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman
minds.

In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic
tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of
bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and
under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its
depth and intensity. His touching friendsh